Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Indignationis not about the 1950s
of Happy Days, and not a chic retro
dream like Carol. It takes place
during the grim Truman vs. Stalin year of 1951, with the Korean War slamming
in, a migraine sequel to WWII. Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman) seeks to avoid
conscription, so the bright Jewish boy, a butcher’s son, opts for Ohio’s spiffy
Winesburg College. Only 40 of the 1,300 students are Jews, and the single
Jewish fraternity pursues handsome Marcus. Independent, he says no. Later he
stands up in fierce resistance to Dean Caudwell, a pillar of Christian snobbery
who is less anti-Semitic than anti-rebel, hating the freshman’s crisp candor
and bold atheism. If this dean ever sees Brando on screen, he’ll probably drop
dead.

Marcus’s
confrontation with conformity blimp Caudwell (Tracy Letts, like a smug merger
of John Houseman and John Lithgow) is the centerpiece of the absorbingly smart
movie directed by James Schamus, who adapted Philip Roth’s novel. Here is the
Roth fixation on a vampy, mysterious shiksa
(Sarah Gadon), his Portnoy emphasis on penile pleasure, and the old, anti-erotic
currents in Jewish family life. Linda Esmond plays Marcus’s mother as a
“loving” terror. When she corners him about the dangerous blonde, she’s even
scarier than Shelley Winters as the guilt-milking mama in Next Stop, Greenwich Village.

With
justice you could say that Indignation
is a bookish, performance-driven movie. But that would undersell the deeply
subtle work by Lerman, Letts, Gadon and Esmond, and it would skip over how well
Schamus and his cinematographer, Christopher Blauvelt, wove the emotional
texture of a bygone time, creating a slightly archaic, softly shadowed aura of
memory. It isn’t corny or nostalgic, and Roth’s deftness is respected. The story’s
generic campus elements are absorbed in a fully adult way. The opening gives us
a fair clue to an ending that arrives with pathos and resonance.

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected
World

As
usual in his documentaries, Werner Herzog seals up any cracks in his new film
with his voice, that purringly Teutonic tonality that sounds like a less
sardonic Christoph Waltz. Lo and Behold:
Reveries of the Connected World is fairly minor Herzog about a truly major
subject: the birth, growth and future of the Internet. We are being devoured by
this shining, cryptic beast. As we are absorbed, fretful Werner guides, informs
and spooks us about the future, in ten brief, rather professorial segments.

Here
are the wiz-dweebs who sent the very first cyber message in 1969, from UCLA to
Stanford and back. One of them proudly shows us the dull room where it happened
(and got stuck, briefly, on the third letter). Here is a stuffy savant attempting,
a little desperately, to reassure us that as machines become brainier, we will,
too. Here is rich, remote visionary Elon Musk, coming off as the sullen love
child of Ayn Rand and Werner Von Braun. Here are computer volunteers who helped
to code-build a new cancer treatment, and scientists devising big robots. The
last seems an awful waste of money and smarts, given our current problems.

Parents
will shiver with the young man whose obsessive game addiction has led him into
therapy. We can all tremble as a chipper, blithe woman tells us that an epic solar flare
could wipe out the Web and much of civilization. Depend upon Herzog to festoon
the pensive flow with special touches, such as Buddhist monks fixatedly tweeting in
Chicago. And a distraught family, their dead daughter smeared by vile Internet
trolls, poses glumly behind a tidy display of baked goods. It’s enough to make
you want to hurry back to, oh, 1957, even if that means losing every Herzog
movie.

George Orson Welles explains how he got his name: “Orson is a family name,
descending from the Orsinis. Also because by a bewildering and rather tiresome
coincidence, my mother and father were on holiday in Rio, with (humorist)
George Ade and a man whose name was Orson Wells, without the ‘e,’ but with $30
million.I’d have those millions now if
only I’d gone to visit my godfather … I’d go now, on my knees. But as a 12-year-old I had my pride.” (Welles to
Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

R.I.P. Gene Wilder, 1933-2016.

For his classic "baby blankie" shtick in The Producers, Wilder "recalled his childhood dog Julie and 'rubbing my cheek against her curly fur.' He felt actual fury when Zero Mostel grabbed the little cloth, but love returned in force. Wilder also felt that Mostel 'looked after me as if I were a baby sparrow." (From the Zero Mostel/The Producers chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

Friday, August 26, 2016

Did
she know she was terrible? Did she actually hear
her sound? Those
questions shadow Florence FosterJenkins, the latest and most appealing
look at the wealthy, notes-nagging fantasist who benignly tortured audiences
made mostly of friends, camp (even campy) followers and a few bribed “critics.”

The
movie mentions her syphilis, courtesy ofher first, callous husband, Dr. Jenkins. Long treatments may have caused
hearing damage. Stephen Frears’s film gives a more satisfying reason for
Florence’s misunderstanding. She (Meryl Streep) is kept in a cocoon of protective
adoration, a vanity bubble, by her second, “common law” husband, the retired
English actor St. Clair Bayfield. Living up to that marvelous name, Hugh Grant brandies
his voice and makes St. Clair the most devoted of comforting spongers.

For
sex and fun he keeps a mistress in a nearby New York apartment, but genuinely loves
“Bunny,” his much older wife (echoes of Raymond Chandler’s devotion to his aged
Cissy). Suave, devious, dapper, at times making his charm sweat, St. Clair could
be the sweet-spot performance of Grant’s mid-career. His younger, dithering cuteness
is gone for good. Perhaps not since Erich von Stroheim served Gloria Swanson in
Sunset Boulevard has romantic loyalty
felt quite so madly right.

When
Frears and writer Nicholas Martin first saw and heard Streep, swooping and fluttering
in Flo’s matronly hats, boxy furs and absurd costumes, they surely thought: home free, baby. As the deluded diva she
has another late-career ball. “I am a silly woman,” says Flo in a wistful
moment, but she’s also silly for glory. With St. Clair bracing her to face listeners
who often can’t help laughing, she cracks and flattens high notes as if
breaking her own sound barrier. In her head, it’s wonderful (Jenkins died at 76
in 1944, a month after her biggest concert, a flop; some recordings remain).

Streep
did her own singing, unlike Citizen Kane
opera victim Dorothy Comingore, who was “covered” by versatile soprano Jean
Forward. “It’s hard work to sing badly well,” said Judy Kaye, who once played
Jenkins on stage. “You could sing badly badly for a while, but you’ll hurt
yourself if you do it for long.” Finely coached, calling up her legendary and
never lazy technique, Streep injects emotional cues that make Flo’s fractured
arias not just funny-awful but strangely touching. In the perfumed shower of
her mind, lyrical notes cascade flawlessly.

Totally
essential are three splendid actors: Streep, Grant and Simon Helberg. As Flo’s
new pianist, Cormé McMoon, Helberg is in the noodle nebbish tradition of Franklin
Pangborn, Austin Pendleton and the recently departed Yiddish schtickmeister Fyvush Finkel. At first
in a panic that working for Jenkins will ruin his little career, Cormé squelches
his yelps and titters as he evolves from
anxious accompanist to faithful accomplice. Under-used is Christian McKay, the
excellent Orson of Me and Orson Welles,
now a critic who won’t be bribed (Earl Wilson, later a top gossip columnist).
Like Richard Linklater’s 2009 Welles salute, this one is set in a nostalgic
Manhattan concocted in Britain, using generic clips, crafty sets and computerization.
Here is the era when Carnegie Hall was a cultural Valhalla, and Maestro Arturo
Toscanini was a god.

A
cozy time capsule, Florence Foster
Jenkins is tender for its heroine and her dressy claque of veteran fans. It
skips the conceptual tangents of 2015’s Marguerite,
the very French tribute inspired by Jenkins. It is no sin to cherish the kamikaze
maneuvers of Florence’s voice, and the cuckoo dream of her will-to-warble. Personally,
give me Flo in full blast over Pierce Brosnan’s painful exertions in Mamma Mia! Of her recitals, remember: they came from the heart. They just had some
trouble, you know, getting through the throat.

SALAD (A List)

The
Ten Best Meryl Streep Performances,
by my loyal if not reverent calculation: Karen in Silkwood;Julia in Julie & Julia; Lindy in A Cry in the Dark; Florence in Florence Foster Jenkins; Helen in Ironweed; Margaret in The IronLady; Francesca in The
Bridges of Madison County; Sophie in Sophie’s
Choice; Miranda in The Devil Wears
Prada; Yolanda in A Prairie Home
Companion.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

In
1933, not yet 18, Orson Welles began writing a study guide to Shakespeare. His
mentoring friend, Todd School director Roger Hill, was thrilled from the first
words of Orson’s introduction: “Shakespeare said everything. Brain to belly;
every mood and minute of a man’s season. His language is starlight and
fireflies and the sun and the moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer,
and his words march like heartbeats. He speaks to everyone.” Which is my cue to
inform you that his best Shakespearean film, Chimes at Midnight (also known as Falstaff), is coming out, restored, on Blu-ray and DVD from
Criterion. Next week! Unmissable! (Welles quote from Patrick McGilligan’s Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on
the Path to Citizen Kane).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“As
Susan Sontag cheerfully told me in 1978, ‘thought is not simply to control
emotions, but provoke them. It’s not to get detached, but titillate oneself
with things, to revel in them!’ In
that spirit I hope to animate these affections without pious glazing, without
any monastic devotion to received text.” (From the Introduction in my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies,
available on Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

Friday, August 12, 2016

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu,
served fresh each Friday.(Time for a summer pause. The next Nosh will be on Aug. 26)

­­

APPETIZER (reviews of Life,
Animated and Captain Fantastic)

At
age three Owen Suskind was the bright, adorable son of bright, adoring parents
(his older brother Walter was also fairly fab). But then, he suddenly wasn’t
there, and father Ron, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, felt “like we were
looking for clues to a kidnapping.” Owen had fallen into the dark mental cave
of severe autism, spoke gibberish and seemed an emotional alien. Cornelia, the
mom, tearfully staved off panic. Doctors offered little hope, and everyone felt
in exile from the playful little boy who had caught an express to oblivion.

And
then, incrementally, the miracle. One day Ron realized that one of Owen’s obscure
blurts was dialog from The Little Mermaid.
The kid had loved Disney cartoon films, now he was using memory (and new
viewings) to build an expanding vent of recovery. The family got into his
Dis-mension, as dialog (and songs) mutated into Owen’s growing vocabulary of therapy.
True, his voice still sounds a bit cartoonish, and his preference for sidekick figures reveals a self-doubting
resistance to heroes. He and his family are
heroes, and by the end of Life, Animated
the odd but thoughtful graduate is getting his own apartment and a job. The
Suskinds still dote on him, without corny (don’t say “Disney”) sentimentality.

Impeccably filmed by Roger Ross Williams and edited by David Teague, Life, Animated use home videos, interviews, fabled movie clips and
beautifully fluent, non-Disney drawings of Owen’s comeback (Gilbert Gottfried
drops in, amusingly). It is the best documentary about an artistic rise from mental
damage since 2010’s Marwencol, and
though we don’t need to get too drippy about Disney, a corporate empire, the
sense of how such imaginative products impact young lives becomes unusually,
personally moving. Owen is a love-saved Pinocchio, becoming (again) a real
boy, and now a boyish man of 25. We easily embrace him, his family, the film
and the Disneycharacters. Did it help
that Owen’s brother is named Walt?

Captain Fantastic

Harking
back to an era when growing a beard seemed an important cultural decision, Captain Fantastic is about a modern Pacific
Northwest family living in the forest. The survivalist dad teaches kids (three
girls, three boys) to hunt wild game with knives and rope-climb sheer cliffs.
The kids are Central Casting charmers, and the family rapport has appeal. Viggo
Mortensen as Ben Cash, the father recently widowed, is like the manly totemof a new, pioneering race. His children, while
living rough, are also reading Nabokov, physics and languages. They strum folksy
guitars but also appreciate Bach.

Like
an overhaul of Swiss Family Robinson sprinkled
with Ken Kesey, even some Noam Chomsky, the movie has a stacking-the-chips
script. The Cashes go to New Mexico for the mother’s funeral. The kids gawk at
fat people in fast-food restaurants, and are wowed by video games. When they say
“Stick it to the man,” we can’t tell if the film is saluting or ribbing a ’60s radicalism
from before their birth. Mortensen’s hovering, patriarchal smugness meets its match
when the rich, piously Christian grandfather tries to take away the children –
nobody glowers with smugness better than Frank Langella.

An awkwardly
staged scene in church recalls those vessels of artificial counter-culture, Tom
Laughlin’s Billy Jack movies. Director
Matt Ross clamps on tight close-ups whenever emotions rise, as if insisting
that we feel this now. In sincerity
the movie echoes the better, Sixties-haunted family movie Running on Empty (1988), but it is hurt by facile touches like Ben’s
old Jesse Jackson campaign shirt. If Ben ever noticed Trump on TV, his rage
might set the forest on fire.

In
May, 1941, Citizen Kane opened at the
El Capitan Theater in Hollywood, refurbished for the occasion. Despite Hearst
press hostility, “on hand were Charles Laughton, Gloria Swanson, Mickey Rooney,
Maureen O’Hara, Franchot Tone, Olivia de Havilland, Sonia Henie, Bob Hope,
Dorothy Lamour and Adolphe Menjou …Welles himself showed up with Dolores Del
Rio on his arm, and (as before) the two slipped out a side door after the film
began. He still couldn’t sit through a screening of his movie without calculating
how it might be improved.” (From the obscure but stimulating Walking Shadows by John Evangelist
Walsh.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“By
hoarding dialog coins, then investing them in a cascading verbal crescendo, Paris, Texas risks everything on our
attentive, patient goodwill. This was gutsy, given the doubting, cynical,
sentimental or sensational habits of modern audiences. With Wim Wenders, Sam
Shepard gambled his way to what Elizabeth Hardwick had discerned in his plays:
‘Tone and style hold the work together, create whatever emotional force it will
have.” (From the Harry Dean Stanton/Paris,
Texas chapter of my book Starlight
Rising: Acting Up in Movies, now available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

A
sad feeling crept over me as I watched Café
Society – that I was visiting the gilded tombstone of Woody Allen’s long,
prolific career. It wasn’t only that Allen, narrating, sounds old (he’s 80)
with a voice now darker, dryer, with a touch of wrinkled crepe. No, it’s
because everything in the movie, even the young actors, seems stuck in the
amber of the past, in a deluxe dossier of old Woody themes and jokes and
familiar types. There really is no café society now, nor nightclubs in the
classic sense. In hankering back to their best era (the 1930s), with less wit
than he showed in Midnight in Paris,
Allen seem to be filing himself away.

The
movie is, almost literally, set in amber. Vittorio Storaro (The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris), who is to succulent color and “magic hour”
cinematography what Gregg Toland (Citizen
Kane) was to impeccable black-and-white, has shot ’30s Hollywood as Allen’s
nostalgic dream of a magic hour that never quits. Every building, set and
costume is a pampered palette of rose, cream, umber, beige, honey or radiant
gold, with contrasts of palm green and deep red. The young lovers, Vonnie
(Kristen Stewart) and Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg) have reddish hair. Inevitably, the
film they see in a plush movie palace is Barbara Stanwyck’s Woman in Red. Meanwhile, the more enjoyable,
effervescent Parker Posey, bleached into peroxide blonde, is used as a plot
decal, a throwaway.

Café Society is like one of those fold-out postcard packets of Old
Hollywood vistas, found in collector shops. But Allen’s script is no
collectible. Bobby is a bright, restless, Jewish fella who left his dull New
York life and kvetching, sit-com family to nab a job from Uncle Phil (Steve
Carell), a film-biz agent who knows all the stars and studio chiefs. Bobby falls
fast for Phil’s office “girl,” Vonnie, who sorta, kinda falls for him. Phil sloppily
hides his affair with Vonnie from his wife. Carell is very good at bossy squirming,
guilty pleading, pledging love while fielding calls and schmoozing clients. But
neither love tangle has any special heat or force. They’re petrified soap, like
a bad old “woman’s picture.”Part
of the problem is the young stars. As Bobby, Eisenberg is a deft actor with
glints of charm. But his reedy, boyish voice and hunched, Ed Sullivan posture
make his Romeo contortions rather pitiful. He seems a chump, because Stewart
plays Vonnie as a sexy climber who will follow her “heart” to lush security.
Allen keeps strumming the notion that the two have a haunted, recurrent attachment,
even after he spits on the Hollywood fantasy he has gilded, by declaring it shabby
and shallow. As often before, the director is enchanted by the freshest young female,
even when she turns on the Woody-nerdish hero, and even after Bobby finds a wife
(Blake Lively) who is more beautiful, loyal and deserving than Vonnie.

By
then, Bobby’s gangster brother (amusing Corey Stoll) has got him work at a Manhattan
nightclub, where he becomes the imposing manager and host (if you believe
Eisenberg as that, I’d love to pitch you on him as Rick in a Casablanca sequel). Allen, never an L.A.
fan despite his love of movies, flees homeward to his New York turf and set-up
gags that were old when he was writing for Sid Caesar. The Jewish family
stereotypes are so primordial that even Jackie Mason might wince and mumble Oy vey. Meanwhile, vintage tunes keep
coming, elegant sights keep glowing, and our minds are wondering: Is this the
last woo from Woody?

SALAD (A List)

Here
are My Ten Favorite Woody Allen Movies,
in order of affection: Zelig, Annie Hall,
Broadway Danny Rose, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Take the Money and Run, Midnight
in Paris, Husbands and Wives, Love and Death, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Vicky
Cristina Barcelona, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (avoid at all costs: Interiors).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson
Welles’s last years became a litany of creative rejections, often “very hard
news. Frank Brady writes that admirer Jack Nicholson refused to halve his usual
$4 million starring fee, which would have let Welles cast him and win backing
for his last major project (The Big Brass
Ring). Six other big stars, all ‘friends,’ also turned him down. It’s
enough to make you weep, and at least once (Brady found) Welles wept. Here is
Orson near the end, lunching with Croesus-rich Steven Spielberg, and supplicant
Welles has to pick up the tab.” (From
my 1989 San Diego Union review of
Brady’s Citizen Welles).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The
pinnacle moment for Audrey Hepburn in Funny
Face was her ravishing rush down steep Louvre stairs to photographer Fred
Astaire’s camera: “I was scared stiff I’d break my neck,’ Audrey recalled. ‘High
heels, all those steps, Givenchy’s full-length gown. Thank God, Fred got me in
one shot.’ The stunning image, freeze-framed in seven color changes, is an
apotheosis and a promise of any musical’s chief motive: love.” (From the Audrey
Hepburn/Funny Face chapter of my book
Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies,
available on Amazon, Nook and Kindle).

David Elliott's book

About Me

David Elliott was film critic of the Chicago Daily News, USA Today, San Diego Union-Tribune, SDNN.com, The Reader (San Diego), and covered arts and entertainment for the Chicago Sun-Times. Retired but not hibernating, he lives in green Eugene, Oregon. (Photo by Travis Elliott.)